A simple breath test could one day tell a doctor whether a patient has lung cancer, a respiratory infection, or heart failure, without needles, scans, or waiting days for lab results. The problem is that while exhaled breath contains hundreds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that vary between diseases, no reliable breath test exists for routine clinical use. The main barrier is not the technology itself, but the lack of a coordinated team to develop, test, and validate it across different diseases and healthcare settings. EMBER brings together chemists, data analysts, and clinicians from the University of Leicester, Loughborough University, and local NHS trusts to solve this. If EMBER succeeds, breath analysis could become a standard diagnostic tool in GP surgeries, hospital wards, and even patients’ homes. This would speed up diagnosis for respiratory infections, lung cancer, asthma, COPD, and heart failure, and help clinicians choose the right treatment for each patient. It would also reduce the need for blood tests in children and frail elderly patients with multiple conditions. The project is applied, not fundamental science—its goal is to move breath testing from the lab into real clinical use.
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Our vision is to establish the East Midlands Breathomics Pathology Node (EMBER) as a centre-of-excellence to ensure the development of novel breath analysis tests to help understand disease processes and clinical decision making. This will help develop new ways to improve the way we can chose the right treatment for the right patient. Measuring breath is familar to us all in the setting of the breathalyser to detect alcohol levels, but perhaps less well known is that exhaled breath contains lots of substances known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) derived from the lung itself and from more distant organs. Recent advances in technology allow the pattern and quantity of these VOCs to be measured rapidly in patients in hospital, the doctors clinic and potentially at home. The patterns of these substances varies between diseases and can distinguish between different types of the same condition. The range of clinical conditions for which breath tests could be useful is very large. EMBER will intially focus upon respiratory infections, lung cancer, chronic respiratory disease such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cardiovascular disorders such as heart failure. The main barrier to advancing breath analysis as a routine test is that its development requires bringing together a large multi-disciplinary team of scientists and clinicans that are experts in breath analysis to work with the NHS, industry and patients to make these ideas a reality. The East Midlands has a unique and congruent group of clinical and analytical researchers drawn from the University of Leicester (UoL), the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) and Loughborough University (LU) with strengths in clinical research, analytical chemistry, data management and mathematical analysis of complex data. EMBER will focus these combined strengths, and co-ordinates existing collaborations with industry partners to create a nationally-leading centre in breath analysis with the critical mass to establish world-class delivery of new technology to the clinic, and training today's and the future scientists and health care professionals. EMBER will deliver near-patient and remote sensing technologies to analyse breath. We shall rigorously test these technologies in different diseases and in different health care settings such as acute hospitals, secondary and primary care and in the home. We shall include vulnerable patient groups such as the elderly with complicated multiple diseases and children in whom blood tests are more challenging. EMBER will ensure the usefulness of these tests so that their application brings economic and health benefits by helping to make the right decisions in choosing the right treatment for patients.
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